The monthly drama surrounding the nation’s unemployment rate will play out again next Friday when the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) releases its April report. It’s become an industry upon itself with different organizations and media sources making predictions prior to the release and then subsequently debating its merits afterward. The methodology employed by the BLS makes any result unreliable as a true measure of the nations employment situation, yet the results drive policy and have a significant effect on the political climate in America.

The biggest problems are in what defines an employed person and how people are counted in the survey taken each month to derive the nations official measure of the unemployment rate.

The BLS considers one employed if you work as little as one paid hour per month. If you work at least 15 hours unpaid, such as in a family business, you are also counted…